By the year 2333, it has become common knowledge for the nexuses – the offspring of human civilization – that time does not just flow forward. Aking to a video tape, at a random point, time flips its direction. Humans start to walk backwards, their eyes shine the light back into the sun, and they unmake their memories. Then after an arbitrary period – be it a minute, a decade, or a millennia – time flips its direction again, ushering a new timerun. Events occur again, but never exactly the same as before.
Understanding the theory of timerun allows people to communicate with the past and the future. But the future has gradually gone dark, hinting at a looming crisis. All attempts of the nexuses to model the future (to definitively predict the crisis) have been unsuccessful. September – a small nexus consisted of 1,200 humans, AI, and other things – instead looks in the opposite direction; seeking answers in a 450 year old Persian poem that predicts this nexus era with stunning accuracy, written by a mysterious Iranian clergyman nicknamed Mirza.
Around the year 1900, long before the penning of the poem, Mirza finds himself back in his birthplace of Isfahan. He has lost all his belongings, and his servant’s life, to the road thieves. What was meant to be a fruitful trading journey to Constantinople, ended in tragedy. Seen by Isfahan’s aristocracy as a waste of his family status, he faces an uphill battle to reestablish himself – without revealing secrets about his trip and his role in his servant’s murder.
Nilu – an Iranian-Canadian immigrant living in the Toronto of 2020 – is on a quest of her own when she gets caught up in September’s search. She has to broker an understanding between her people’s ancestors and descendants, in hopes of making sense of it all.
The journeys of Mirza, Nilu, and September get more tangled by a Plotian – an alien opposite to humans.
It only makes memories when time flows backwards...
Immerse yourself in a world that ties fiction to the stranger-than-fiction history of Iran. Start reading now.
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